


Horror Vacui

by thought



Category: Stargate Atlantis, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Vast!Sheppard, incredibly dubious morality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 15:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21710560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: One of the first things you should know about John Sheppard is that he likes Ferris wheels and anything that goes over 200 miles per hour. No, really. This is important.
Relationships: John Sheppard & Atlantis, John Sheppard & Rodney McKay
Comments: 19
Kudos: 95





	Horror Vacui

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to the people on tumblr who encouraged this.  
> I... think you can read this without knowledge of TMA, but I'm not entirely sure.

It was John's mom who had been claimed. He's never sure by who, even as an adult, combs his rose-tinted childhood memories of her for some hint but comes up empty. She'd told him stories, though. Taught him what to watch out for. His dad hadn't liked it. As a kid John had thought it was because he didn't believe what she was saying, didn't like her filling John's head with fantastical nightmares when it should have been full of riding lessons and music lessons and football and tutoring because there was no way Patrick Sheppard's kid was going into Kindergarten unable to read or count or say 'please' and 'thank you' and 'pardon me' and 'yes, that's right, Sheppard Utilities'. Later, John realizes his father believed fully. Hell, maybe he'd been marked by one of the entities, too. But spiders and fire and darkness weren't going to help shape John into the next CEO.

After his mom dies he doesn't give any of it much thought. Well, ok, not entirely accurate. He gives it as much thought as he would give not walking out into traffic, or using a tea towel to grab a hot dish. Yes, there are probably eldritch horrors in the boarded up utility shed behind his school, but he's got tests to study for and excuses to come up with as to why he doesn't spend any time at home except to sleep. It's not until college that they start ...courting him.

The thing that not many people know is that the Air force wasn't his original 'fuck you, dad' plan. His first plan had been, well, math.

When Rodney finds out, years later and a galaxy away, he laughs so hard he snorts coffee out of his nose, then punches John, hard, in the arm. "You know, it doesn't even surprise me that twenty-year-old Sheppard looked at his asshole dad and decided a spite PHD was the best rebellion tactic. Wow, wow, yeah, you could have really shown him."

Numbers are easy. People are easy too, at least on the surface, but numbers don't exhaust him like conversation does. The summer before he starts his masters he spends a lot of time on quantum mechanics. He hadn't really given it any thought until a class in his final year of undergrad that he took purely because it fit his schedule and he needed the credits. By the end of the course he's more invested in the quantization of topological spaces than he's been in anything since the first time he got to sit in the cockpit of an airplane as a child. He shuffles his grad school acceptance letters with his eyes closed and tosses all but one in the trash.

The doors start appearing in October. He knows what they are, but it takes until January before he realizes they're there for him. He comes back from spring break and there's a black door right beside his bedroom closet, the entire surface covered in intricate, endless fractals that he can't look at too closely but still finds himself doodling in the margins of his textbooks. It doesn't go away. Switching his thesis topic this late in the game is tough, but probably not as tough as losing his humanity and individuality and bodily integrity to the Spiral.

*

Later that spring he goes on a date with a girl in one of his classes. She's on an international program from the UK, and she drags him to one of those shitty moving carnivals an hour's drive from the university.

"You realize all of these rides are probably just waiting to fall apart," John says, but she just laughs at him.

Her name is Harriet, and she makes him go on all the rides, then dares him to eat fried Coca-Cola and seems kind of disgustedly impressed when he does it with a shrug. They go on the Ferris wheel just as the sun's about to set.

"I've always liked Ferris wheels," she says.

"Me too."

They stop at the very top. The bar in their car hasn't locked in place properly, and Harriet pushes it out of the way so she can lean over the side of the car and stare down. "It's so peaceful up here," she says. "Quiet. Just the sky." She takes John's hand and tugs him towards her, like she wants him to lean off the side too. "I really love it up here."

John's palms are sweating but he catches her eyes. "Me too," he says.

She frowns at him, tips her head to the side and studies him silently for a minute. Then she releases his hand and leans back, laughing. "Ok, John," she says. "I believe you."

They don't put the bar back down. She kisses him on the cheek before he drops her off at the dorms. He never sees Harriet again, but when he gets home the door is gone from his bedroom.

*

Even with the door gone, mathematics no longer feels like the safe haven it once had. Nothing really feels safe, and his father still phones him once a month to ask if he's come to his senses and is ready to come home. John thinks a lot about that Ferris wheel. He hadn't been lying when he said he loved it. And-- well. There is no shortage of careers of his father would find unacceptable.

John walks across the stage on Thursday and heads to the nearest recruitment office first thing Friday morning.

The next few years are like nothing John's ever experienced. The work isn't difficult, but following orders without question is more challenging than he could have possibly imagined. He doesn't realize how much he hates taking orders until he doesn’t want to hate it any more. He meets good people and even better planes, finds that building bonds of loyalty and friendship isn't exhausting when blood and trauma and desperation have torn down all the walls of social niceties and false bravado.

That loyalty is his eventual downfall, of course. He knows he's going back for Holland and the others even before he's ordered not to. The desert stretches out beneath him and all he can think about is his friends, his men, alone and dying in a foreign country for a cause that feels shakier each day. He's going to get them back. He's going to bring them home. He's going to tear the fucking world apart for what it has done to his people, his friends, the family that has been more family than his father or brother ever have.

He can hear the steady thump of his copter blades. The wind rushing past. Gunshots in the distance.

He can hear music.

"Oh fuck you," John says, but the music doesn't stop. He looks down and realizes he's got three guns strapped to his flight suit, knives in his belt, explosives in the storage space behind him. He doesn’t remember gathering all of this, but it's good he did, will help him tear his way through anyone who gets in his way--

"Jesus Christ," John says, and for the first time since the door in his bedroom vanished, he feels a slowly creeping sense of terror. He's close to where he left Holland. Would need to land anyway if he has any hope of staying under the radar. He pulls the helicopter up as high as he can go, bushes and buildings getting smaller and smaller on the ground. Finally, he leans back in his seat and takes a few deep breaths, stares out at the empty sky on all sides, silent and peaceful and uncaring of his mistakes. He thinks about the Ferris wheel.

He cuts his engines.

Everything is very quiet. He doesn't hear the music anymore.

He falls for a long time, and when he hits the ground he's too late to save his friends, but at least he doesn't kill anybody else that day.

*

He's put on administrative leave for a week before the higher-ups decide what they're going to do with him, and he goes out to California like every cliché he's never quite managed to be, spends his days surfing and his evenings drunkenly preparing the divorce papers and his nights imagining a world where he stayed in academia, where he had students and an office and a surfboard of his own.

He sends the papers by mail, doesn't call Nancy even though he knows it's the courteous thing to do. Their marriage has always been a rare obedience to social pressures -- all of the guys in John's unit had somebody waiting at home for them, and Nancy had figured an absent husband would be less obstructive to her career than the constant judgement from her family. They are both in the uncomfortable position of being liked by their in-laws far more than their actual parents. John's a decent enough human being that he knows he has no right to drag her into this new era of his life. He hopes that by keeping their future interactions limited to paperwork he won't draw attention to her.

He leaves California nostalgic for a life he never lived and with his hair too long. He stands in front of his CO and doesn't bother pretending at remorse or respect. At this point, he's got nothing left that anyone can take from him.

He takes the Antarctica posting because the idea of a life without flying is quite literally unimaginable, and the endless sheets of white snow and shining ice tug at him like long-denied friendships, brimming with possibility and safety. Everything is cold and quiet and sharp, hyper-real in a way that the desert with its sun and sand and blood and senseless death can never be in his memory.

*

He doesn't kill anyone in Antarctica.

This is, if he's being honest, a fucking accomplishment. He expects to kill someone. He feels it in his head all the time, in his bones and the back of his throat, like a craving for some specific taste he can't pin down. It's easy to drag the fear out of people. His entire job is flying a goddamn helicopter over an endless expanse of sheer white nothingness. It's nothing to glide higher and higher until that first startled gasp or suddenly clenched jaw-- Hapless scientists, Air force generals and colonels with more metal on their jackets than insulation. They all think they're better than him. Maybe in whatever hierarchy exists in classified murder-science winter wonderland they are. But when they're in the sky, rank and smarts and security clearance don't matter. In the sky, nothing beneath them but clouds and empty air, John's the one in control.

Possibly he has a few unresolved issues, post his rapid and kind of horrifying disillusionment with the military that had rescued him from a life of hating his dad and probably turning into some sort of fractal impossibility. It's fine. He's... self-medicating.

The thing is, he had prepared himself to kill people. He'd hoped they would be deserving, as much as anyone can be said to be deserving of death. He hadn't made the choice lightly, even with the threat of becoming something mindless and vicious and inhuman. (He's still got his mind, at least, which is a bigger blessing than he'd expected, when he has the time to sit down and drunkenly examine the ethical crisis that is his literal fucking existence for the foreseeable future and, alarmingly, beyond.) Anyway, yes, he's aware his choice demands some moral adjustments. Fewer, after being in the military.

He had expected the craving to be worse. He had expected that, given his familiarity with the subject, there would be no quarter given when it came to handing over human lives to feed his new master. But maybe this whole fear god thing is a little overstated, or Sheppard's not that interesting after all, or his regular access to helicopters in the middle of nowhere gives him a bit of cushion. He keeps a running tally in his head. Days gone without taking a life.

Which is why the first thing that pops into his head when the goddamn ground starts shooting at him and General O'Neill is 'if my first kill up here is because I can't dodge fast enough I'm gonna be really pissed and so is the nebulous conceptualization of kenophobia I report to'.

He sits down in the chair because he's really not a fan of being underground anymore and somehow the chair feels like the only safe place. Also, as soon as he was told not to touch anything he knew he had to touch something. The guy in the orange parka opens his mouth like he's going to say something, but John takes a breath in and the space above him unfolds into stars and planets and galaxies, infinity flirting at the edges of the visible image and John knows his life is about to change. Again. He pulls it in to focus on Earth, then lets the images drift gently further and further away, letting his mind trail through the idea of the endless void of space like a child dragging fingers through running water.

"Oh, yes," Orange Parka says, softly. "That's amazing."

John grins up at him, giddy. "I know."

*

By the time they leave for Atlantis John is... not doing great.

"I'm sorry, did you say *under* NORAD?"

He's constantly nauseous and his head is killing him and he kind of wants to pull all of his skin off. No, he doesn’t. That's definitely an exaggeration because that's fucking horrifying and he's handled a lot worse than a couple days underground. He's just feeling... a little... trapped. Smothered. His uniform feels like sandpaper against his skin and his boots may as well have lead weights in the bottoms for the effort it takes to lift his feet. His hair lies flat without any assistance for the first time since he was an actual infant.

He practically runs through the ominously flickering, inexplicably stable wormhole that these guys just keep in their fucking basement because if his atoms are crushed and then shredded across space and time forever he will at least no longer be stuck beneath a mountain and surrounded by nervously sweaty scientists and marines.

He steps into Atlantis and kind of blacks out for a few seconds. He was attending corporate functions at eighteen and getting shot at by thirty, so he keeps walking even while his higher consciousness takes a quick time out. There's a staircase in front of him so he walks up it, obviously, and doesn’t even notice the lights springing to life in his wake because his skull is currently housing an emergency confab between an ancient sentient alien city, a trans-dimensional intent-based entity of dubious existential continuity, and John's tiny human consciousness which is primarily focused on an all-encompassing and heretofore unrealized appreciation for architecture and the physical state of not having a headache.

Atlantis shows him the blueprints for one of the balconies at the top of the city and John thinks he might actually die if he doesn't get to jump off of it in the next five minutes. Atlantis is a little alarmed by this reaction, but the other thing in John's head is pleased.

"If this turns into tug-of-war I'm out," John warns them both, and then realizes his imminent plunge from her highest tower is not the only thing Atlantis is alarmed about.

*

John kills someone in Pegasus.

John kills a lot of someones in Pegasus, actually, but plenty of them don't count.

'Your death is not a value add,' he thinks, shooting the tenth Genii of the day and he laughs to himself as he swallows back vomit. Atlantis soothes him absently, but she's mostly focused on the storm and the invaders, which is the exact opposite of soothing. The more people John kills with his gun or his hands the worse he feels. Without context, this statement is entirely acceptable.

Not all days are bad, though. Atlantis doesn't like that John belongs to something else so he tries to keep everything he does out of the city. They encounter enough hostiles on mission that it's easy. He never feels guilty when the fastest way to scare someone into letting his friends go is by letting them fall for a while. Has no compunction about disarming a threat simply by hitting them with intense vertigo. And... well. Sometimes there are people who will kill him or his team if he doesn't kill them first, and sometimes they happen to be at the top of a hill or a cliff or a building and it's as natural as breathing, honestly.

Sometimes if he's restless he'll take a puddle jumper out and throw himself around in the emptiness of space until he no longer feels a constant itching in his bones. Sometimes he gets that weird craving sensation and he'll strike up a conversation with whoever happens to be out on the balcony or up in the towers about the grandeur of space and the ocean, the thrill of the mystery and the freedom and the reassurance of knowing how small humanity is, comparatively. He means every word, and they're all too polite or too far under him in the chain of command to argue or ask him to stop. He's not even hurting them. Space really is beautiful.

The Wraith do not fear like humans do. Probably the Lonely would have a better chance at them than John ever will. It's disappointing, that would have been convenient.

He doesn't expect anyone to find out. Even if somehow someone were to notice something off, it's not like they'd have any idea what they had stumbled upon. He didn't account for a team. Never has, really, tried it Once and found them bleeding out in the desert and once is enough for him.

A couple years in, his team gets thrown into the local village prison on a previously welcoming world.

...Ok, this describes basically every other Tuesday in the Pegasus Galaxy. The thing that makes this week's stop on the intergalactic imprisonment adventure tour unique is that, Genii aside, they're usually locked up in somebody's shed, or tied to a tree, or stuck in a hive ship. None of which are ideal, obviously, but they don't present John with any additional... concerns. He's been conscious of the potential issues his unique circumstances might present, but he's also been pretty confident he'd be able to handle anything he needs to. He's... not wrong, exactly, but he's not exactly right either.

They've been kept for the last three weeks in a cave, victims of misunderstandings and cultural differences and broken communications equipment. John keeps telling himself that there's probably an entire cave system branching off from their current location, but he can't make himself believe it. The air is stagnant and his wrists are raw and probably infected and restrained in front of him. He hasn't slept more than an hour at a time. He can distract himself by watching over his team, blocks out the creeping sensation of sick panic under his skin with the protective anger that buzzes through his blood whenever his team is in danger. When he does sleep he dreams of falling and every time he wakes up he hits the ground and wants, very quietly, to cry. Just a little bit.

The darkness is unsettling and the weight of rock and soil above them is horrific and Rodney keeps trying to distract himself and John with math games but John gave up his love for numbers when he gave up his chances with the Spiral. Equations crowd his mind as surely as the walls and rocks around him crowd his body and he wonders if this is some kind of revenge, years too late.

'I'm sorry I never opened your fucking door,' he thinks, but out loud he says "Not prime."

He holds it together for his team, "it" being his worn-down sense of individual selfhood and also his intensifying sense of boundless, iterative terror, and also to a degree his snarling, frustrated rage. It's hard to breathe. At one point Teyla rests a hand on his shoulder with the intent to soothe and he almost screams at her.

When Lorne comes for them, finally, John stumbles out of the cave and looks down and there's a valley far below them, rusty red gravel and shriveled scrub a not uncompromising drop-off. The others move ahead, scrabbling up the final few feet to where they've parked the jumper. John rubs his swollen wrists and stares down at the semi-conscious guard sprawled on the shale outside the cave entrance. He remembers the way the guard had leered at Teyla, the way he had smirked each time he'd had an excuse to slam Ronon into the ground.

"Sure is a long way down, huh?" John says, mildly. The guard blinks dazedly up at him. John leans back against the cliff face and if he's lucky it comes across as arrogance instead of a careful attempt not to collapse. John focuses on the guard and wraps himself in the sense of empty, endless sky. The guard scrabbles at the rock beneath him, fingertips leaving bloody trails in the dust. John breathes deep and knows that this is better than any morphine or turkey sandwich or mandated therapy session.

He sort of zones out, a combination of pain and relief and exhaustion coaxing him down into a pseudo meditative doze while his victim goes from frantic to silent and frozen. Teyla is the one who pulls him out of it. Gentle like he doesn't deserve but probably needs. A hand on his shoulder and this time he doesn't shake it off, leans automatically into her familiar presence.

"That's enough, John," she says, soft. "The others are waiting for us."

John wants to kill the guard. John wants, actually, to kill every person who had participated in their capture and imprisonment, one at a time until the thing inside him is satisfied and settled. But his team needs him, and he does not actually want to face the uncomfortable questions that would come with straight up supernaturally murdering a bunch of villagers in front of one of his closest friends who is also their strongest connection with the not-so-hostile peoples of this galaxy. He walks away, lets Teyla guide him up the narrow, treacherous path, squeezes her shoulder when she steps the wrong way on her twisted knee and almost collapses. Rodney and Ronon are waiting for them at the top, and behind them one of the jumpers is reaching eagerly for John like a puppy whose owner has left it at a kennel too long.

Teyla never mentions it. John keeps waiting for something to give, watches her for signs of fear or distrust or a sudden desire to tie him down to a lab table. Or at least suggest that last to Rodney. But it never comes.

*

Another mission, another vaguely alarming head injury courtesy of the time-honoured tradition of Beating our enemy over the head with big rocks until they stop moving'. John wakes up briefly in the infirmary, but all the lights are too bright and he can't remember if he's on Earth or Atlantis and then he throws up over the side of his bed and possibly passes out in a puddle of his own vomit, he's not really solid on those last few seconds.

The next time he wakes up he's staring up and up and up at a sky so blue it looks fake, the faint impression of storm clouds at the very edges of his view but hardly close enough to be a concern. He can hear the gentle lapping of water, feel wind tugging at the thin, military issue blankets covering him.

He tries to sit up, confused and shivering despite the blankets and sunlight, but something pushes him back down.

"Oh my God, do not move, you idiot, Carsen is already going to kill me, the last thing I need is for you to go proving me right."

"Hi, Rodney," John says. And then, "Where..."

"Atlantis," Rodney says, which, obviously, John can feel her in his head as familiar as breathing. "We're... outside. On one of the towers."

"What's wrong?" John says, trying to sit up and again and getting a more forceful shove for his efforts.

"Nothing. At least nothing like what you're thinking. How much do you remember?"

John rubs a hand across his face. He feels disgusting and a little numb. "I definitely remember one of our new pals trying to cave my skull in with a rock, which is probably a goddamn hallucination, now that I say it out loud. Somehow I don't think I'd remember my concussion so clearly."

Rodney huffs out a breath. "No, no, that part happened and it's absolutely freakish that you remember it, but we see weirder things every couple days around here. You forgot the part where your "pal" through you so hard into one of the stone monument things that you almost broke your neck, and that's not a turn of phrase."

"Huh," says Sheppard. "That part I don't remember."

"you were unconscious, which is probably the only reason it was an almost."

"Still doesn't answer why we're out here," Sheppard says, and yawns.

Rodney is quiet for a minute, then, brusquely, "You're not as subtle as you think you are. I don't know why open spaces help you, but I'm going to figure it out. And in the meantime-- look, you were taking a very long time to wake up coherent, and it wasn't exactly pleasant, watching you be thrown into a spikey stone wall. It's a very distinctive sound."

"Aww, thanks for worrying, buddy," says Sheppard. His eyes ache and his face feels suddenly hot. "Also, maybe I'm claustrophobic. Not exactly a challenging leap of logic."

Rodney snorts. "I'm not actually that stupid, even when it comes to people. It's still observation and analysis ."

John closes his eyes. He doesn't want to have this conversation, and he's starting to get the ominous feeling that if he keeps being awake he's going to start... crying or shaking or some shit. Rodney pats his shoulder gently, and then just doesn't take his hand away. It's very warm. John listens to the waves and tastes the salt on the air and lets the drugs carry him away.

*

It takes Ronon a long time to acknowledge it. They're running from some angry villagers, because their lives are nothing if not repetitively thematic. Ronon spits blood into the bushes and shoves Sheppard out of the way of a gleaming knife blade that imbeds itself in a tree ahead of them.

"You gonna do something about this?" he asks.

"I'm sorry, is the running and the shooting and the signaling for help in fucking Morse code not enough for you?"

"You know what I mean," Ronon says. "Make them afraid."

Sheppard stumbles, rights himself immediately and glances over his shoulder to check on their pursuers. "Uhh," he says.

"We don't have time to have this whole talk," Ronon says, shortly. "You've got a weapon. Use it."

And when he puts it like that it's pretty straight forward. He uses the cover of a copse of trees to focus, take a deep breath. And their pursuers fall like dominos, one on top another, gasping and clawing franticly at the dirt. Ronon steps up beside him.

"good," he says.

Sheppard shivers. He's never had positive reinforcement from outside his head before, and it's a goddamn mindfuck, a shuttery sort of pleased arousal and a sick sense of wrong wrong guilt and panic buzzing just under the surface of his thoughts.

"You can't tell anyone," he says. Ronon snorts.

"Who would I tell?"

Sheppard's brain conveniently provides a bulleted list, but he bites his tongue hard to keep himself quiet.

*

Sheppard definitely kills some people on Earth. He probably should have tried harder to avoid it, but there's a sucking pit of boggy depression and anxiety where his city and his team used to be, and he can't actually think of a more appealing future than allowing himself to be subsumed by wide open spaces and an endless sense of freedom.

Anyway, long story short, nobody had a good time on Earth. Whatever. These things happen.

This should be the end of the story.

Rodney calls him late one night, and before John can get past a hello he says "Find a better coping mechanism."

"What?" says John, flat and confused.

"Seriously, we get the news in Nevada, too. Have you considered therapy?"

"Fuck off," John says.

"Do not make me hold a goddamn intervention."

"Settle down, McKay, no need to go playing superhero."

"That's not-- oh my God, how are you this much of an idiot? I'm worried about you, Sheppard. This is me, as a friend, expressing concern for you as a person."

"I've got it under control."

"Umm," says Rodney, "if you mean your mental health, rebuttal: no you do the fuck not."

"Good talk," John says, and hangs up.

*

"I want you to do your thing to me.," Rodney announces, and John spits coffee halfway across the table, chokes, knocks an elbow into Teyla's bowl of porridge, and glances around frantically to see who's within earshot.

"McKay!"

Rodney waves an impatient hand. "Oh don't give me that look, I'm not that stupid."

John glares. "You maybe want to buy me dinner first?"

Rodney frowns, then actually bothers to pull out a chair and sit down. "What are you talking about?"

"Definitely not what you think he's talking about," Ronon says, amused, and Sheppard feels a hot rush of embarrassed horror flushing his face and the back of his neck.

"Your weird hallucination thing," Rodney says. "The falling."

"Oh," John says, weakly, and mops at the coffee slowly dripping off the edge of the table onto his jacket. And then what Rodney is asking actually sinks in. "Jesus, no."

Rodney huffs. "It's not lethal unless you want it to be, and I'm a scientist. It's me or we start violating research ethics like it's going out of style."

"Or, you could leave it alone," John says, sharply.

Rodney rolls his eyes. "Has anything about my personality ever indicated that I might be convinced to leave something like this alone?"

"Answer's still no," John says, trying to force conviction into his voice even as there's a part of him sitting up and taking an interest.

"We'll see," Rodney says, and with that uncharacteristically vague and alarming pronouncement, he gets right back up and walks out of the mess hall.

"Umm," says John.

"You two sleeping together yet?" Ronon asks.

"No one has placed any wagers," Teyla adds, serenely. "So you should feel free to tell us truthfully."

John gets up, taking his soggy napkins and lukewarm coffee with him. "I'm joining AR-2," he says. "I'm sure you guys and Lorne will be very happy together."

It takes Rodney almost three weeks to get his way, and John's pretty proud of himself for holding out so long. He drags Ronon and Teyla along out to the farthest pier where they won't be seen, because as much as he wants to trust himself, he's not always the majority shareholder in his own brain.

"Don't stand too close to the edge," John says, twisting his hands together behind his back. "You're going to fall into the ocean, you goddamn lemming."

"Yes, yes, I'm moving."

Rodney actually sits down, which is an improvement. John sits across from him, a few feet separating them. "You ready?"

"If you try to use some sort of manly bonding moment of emotional vulnerability to stall this, I won't be the one who ends up in the water."

John flips him off, then leans back on his hands, taking a deep breath and staring up into the heavy clouds hanging above them.

He wants it to be hard. He wants to say to himself and to the others that it's a struggle, that he's wracked with guilt, that he barely touches Rodney for fear of doing harm. John wants a lot of things. He's used to not getting them.

He lets Rodney fall for a couple of minutes, until the pre-set timer on his watch goes off. Rodney groans, one arm wrapping around his stomach, the other hand pressed to his chest as he sucks in air.

"Oh wow," he says. "A lot of our enemies are kind of wimps, huh?"

"Excuse me?" John says.

"Well, I mean, that was awful, don't get me wrong, I might just sleep right here in this exact spot tonight because the idea of getting up seems like way too much effort, but I definitely could have fought through that if we were running for our lives."

"You definitely could not have," John says, stunned. "Believe me."

Rodney pulls out his tablet and starts writing rapidly. "Nah, I'm pretty sure I could have. Getting shot is way worse."

John stares at him. "But you're not exactly a fan of heights, we've had this conversation multiple times."

Ronon groans, presses his face into his palms. Teyla is smiling at them like they're kittens learning to walk for the first time.

"Obviously I'm scared of heights," Rodney says, like John is truly trying his patience. "But this is different. I'm certainly not scared of you."

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to the Spiral and the Slaughter because if anyone else had a chance with Sheppard it's those two.  
> I'm on [tumblr](http://thought-42.tumblr.com)


End file.
